Most existing migration and server consolidation considers entire images, that is, all software running on a physical server or in a virtual partition or virtual machine as a whole. Such approaches aim to deploy these images on fewer servers, typically virtualized, while fulfilling the resource requirements of all of the images. An image may contain one or more key software components. A key software component can include, for example, a web server, an application server, a database server, the individual code modules in the application server, the individual databases in the database server, etc. An image may also be used in one or more enterprise applications. An enterprise application might include, for example, a travel expense application, a product web catalogue, a computer-aided manufacturing application, etc. (that is, a larger IT entity, including one or more interacting software components, that fulfils overall requirements and has to be operational as a whole). Existing approaches, however, lack techniques for migration and other transformation cases to split up different software components that were running on one image (this is also referred to herein as unstacking).